Vitaly Komar was born in Moscow, USSR in 1943, graduated from the Stroganov School of Art and Design in 1967, and has been living in New York since 1978. He was one of the founders of the Sots Art movement (Soviet Pop/Conceptual Art) and a pioneer of multi-stylistic post-modernism (1972-73).Vitaly Komar worked in collaboration with Alex Melamid from 1973 to 2003, exhibiting widely around the world. They were the first Russian artists invited to Documenta 8 in Kassel (1987) and they were also the first Russian artists to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). After the Symbols of the Big Bang exhibited at the Yeshiva University Museum (New York, 2002-03), Vitaly Komar started New Symbolist works. His project Symbols of the Three -Day Weekend was exhibited at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York; Matthew Bown Gallery, London; Marina Sandman Gallery, Berlin; Mina Litinsky Gallery, Denver; Ben Uri Gallery–The London Jewish Museum of Art (receiving the International Jewish Artist of the Year Award); Humanities Gallery at Cooper Union, New York (with a catalog by Dore Ashton and Andrew Weinstein) in 2005. In 2007, he was a Special Guest of the Moscow Biennale (Marat Guelman Gallery and Tretiakov State Gallery).

 

Image: Vitaly Komar, Self-Portrait with the Three Day-Weekend Mandala, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist

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